Bitcoin is still a good bet imo. But, if you want to look at other coins, Litecoin might be a good bet for your $500. The charts look good at the moment.
I'm not really sure about Gulden as it is a currency that focusses itself nationally (The Netherlands). I'm not sure why retailers would not use Bitcoin or ethereum instead. It's cool to own some Guldens again though. They sure do have a great team working behind it though and it could become very succesfull in local stores. I definitely think it won't flop but I wouldn't expect this to be some crazy investment where you can see huge returns.
Gulden is not aimed at The Netherlands. Its roots are from NL yea, but the currency is definitely focussed worldwide. There is really nothing that is focussed on NL only...
True enough. But don't worry, the coin won't disapear because we have a strong community and if the dev is not comming back we will push the project forward. Just fill your bags before we ressurect this coin. Just a tip, don't invest nothing you can't afford to loose.
Gulden (NLG). If you look at upcoming development plans, this can go 40-50x times easily upcoming 2 years. It is really undervalued at the moment and not getting any attention.
Development of PoW2 itself has been done for a while, I'm still finalizing some parts of segsig, after which we will announce official testing (soon) and then launch.
the speed at which Gulden develop will make it hard for marketing coins to keep up and some rich investors will pile into Gulden and provide the marketing themselves because the price and marketcap is non existent compared to coins that have MUCH less development but in the top 20.